The widespread use of plastic credit cards to make purchases of goods and services has been established in commerce for decades. A physically embossed number on the card serves to permit verification of the usability of the charge account against either printed lists furnished by the card user, or by resort to modern computer terminals against which the present validity of a credit card can be quickly checked. In the last decade or more, the cards have been "magnetically" imprinted with a multi-digit number, which a card user must program into the money center computer to make each and every banking transaction. The most critical transaction is a cash withdrawal from a properly funded account.
There are several known risks with the wide availability of the "magnetically-imprinted" cards. An unauthorized person needs only two items to access the account of another customer; these are: physical possession of a computer readable, "magnetic" debit card; and knowledge, from whatever the source, of the four digit personal identification ("PIN") that is "recorded" on the card. With these items, a wrongdoer can extract all of the cash over a period of time from another's personal account; until such time as the true owner recovers the card, cancels the account or ends access thereto based on the stolen card.
Financial institutions must retain much personal information in order to manage the great multiplicity of individual cards and machine access to the funds of those cardholders. One minor reason would be to avoid duplicate assignment of the same PIN number.
A particularly sensitive area for an institution issuing a card is the sanctity of a personal code which is breached by a dishonest employee of the bank. Clearly, the institution normally absorbs any such losses. It must take great care to prevent an inquisitive and malicious employee from gaining access to the bank's records to correlate the name on the money card with the magnetically recorded secret code under that name.
The compelling need should be apparent for a money debit card application form, the processing of said form, and a money card issuance system that precludes any ad hoc access by a bank employee to the vital correlation of customer name and PIN number. Such a system would be a highly desirable innovation with the popularity of ATM transactions.